Gratitude. Grief. Growth.

A Tidy Kitchen Will Break Your Heart

That’s what I was growling under my breath tonight as I clung to the edge of the kitchen sink and tried not to pass out from the bleach fumes. See, G is a chemist by training and he thinks that there’s NOTHING that bleach can’t fix. Especially pots and pans. He–being both a chemist and a MAN–refuses to just pick up the f’ing scrub brush and scrub the pot. Instead, he leaves this morning’s waffle batter bowl sitting in the sink with equal parts bleach and water until the concoction eats through the stuck on stuff. And my last nerve.

This makes me NUTS. Just wash the pots and be done with it!!!! His bleach fetish is also why most of my tshirts have a little line of bleached out dots right across the belly, where I’ve leaned up against the sink too soon after he’s “done the dishes.”

Is it just me or is your blood pressure up too? GAH!!!!

So I finished up all the dishes once my eyes could focus from the fumes. Done and done–ten minutes and NO DAMAGE to anyone’s respiratory system. But the fumes did remind me of a story and a lesson I learned about 10 years ago this summer.

A few weeks after Richard and I bought this house and moved in together, my sister called me. “So how’s it going?” she asked.

“It’s great…except there are a couple of things that are hard to adjust to after a few years on my own.”

She thought I was talking about manstink, but I assured her we had separate bathrooms.

“No, it’s the fact that he NEVER shuts the kitchen cabinets! Or drawers! He’ll walk into a perfectly clean kitchen to make a cup of coffee and leave the cabinet door hanging open, the spoon drawer sticking out, a sticky spoon NEXT TO the sink, and the creamer on the counter!”

My sister hooted. Turns out her husband does the same thing and it makes her crazy too.

For months, Richard walked through the kitchen doing his thing and I walked right behind him tidying up. (Which, if you’ve been in my house since I had kids….is no longer my practice.)

Then he got sick. And he went to Baltimore for treatments. I went up there on his heels for the first week but I had to come home eventually.

One morning, I walked into the kitchen to get something for breakfast and there wasn’t a thing out of place. Except him. The cabinets were fine, but he wasn’t. I sank to the floor, right there in front of that clean sink, and sobbed until the dogs got worried and started to lick me.

A tidy kitchen will break your heart.

Sharing a life with someone takes compromise. Sharing a home with other people is hard. It’s messy.